Stephen Miller Wants to Make His Deportation Machine Permanent

ICE is spending the $38.3 billion Congressional Republicans gave the agency for detention centers.

I recently went to see an exhibit by the prolific artist Ruth Asawa that displayed, among other work, materials from her time designing a memorial for Japanese Americans imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. Years ago, in California, I’d seen the memorial, but I don’t remember being gutted the way I was this month when looking at Asawa’s sketches and notes. I felt the stronger emotional reaction this time because I’m rereading Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, her iconic dissection of German complicity, which is also hitting me differently now than it did years ago, when as a young student I could imagine that ethnic cleansing belonged to distant times and places. Now, Arendt is helping me make sense of what’s happening in real time.

ICE has just announced a new “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative,” which will spend $38.3 billion in taxpayer dollars to buy facilities like warehouses and turn them into detention centers so that the Trump Administration can keep pace with Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller’s arrest quotas and goals for detaining and deporting immigrants en masse. Congressional Republicans made it possible for ICE to detain thousands more people when it allotted the agency an unprecedented $75 billion in additional funding it can spend over four years in their 2025 mega-bill.

The newly unveiled ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative is chilling. According to ICE’s plan, the agency will purchase eight large-scale detention centers and 16 processing sites (in other words, short-term jails) as well as 10 other existing facilities where ICE is already holding immigrants. The agency is describing this plan as a consolidation to increase efficiency. ICE officials have already been scouting locations across the country, and they recently bought one in a suburb of El Paso for $122.8 million. Their goal is to have these new detention centers ready for imprisoning more immigrants by this November.

ICE aims to be able to detain 92,000 people at a time – roughly 20,000 more people than it is holding now – so that the government can hit its goal deportation numbers. Local journalists report that the warehouse near El Paso that will soon be an ICE detention center is large enough that four and a half Walmart Supercenters could fit inside. A sketch of one planned detention center in Social Circle, Georgia features a grid of many little boxes, presumably cells or rooms; each one is filled with rows of ink marks, ostensibly representing the many beds, and therefore people, that will be crammed together in each space. The detention will also reportedly have a gun range for ICE agents. Social Circle’s city manager told reporters that he believes plans for the proposed ICE detention center in his city are “based on some very fundamental flaws.”

“Are these sites going to be used long-term?” reads the FAQ section of ICE’s document outlining its national plan. Answer: “Yes. The new sites will serve as ICE’s long-term detention solution.”

“ICE’s long-term detention solution” is just one part of the government’s strategy to purge people Miller, who is also Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, has described as threats to “civilization.” As we’ve all seen, there’s been a sharp increase in community arrests of immigrants in their workplaces, homes, and on the street, and there’s been a corresponding increase in the number of legal challenges arguing that specific immigration arrests and detentions are illegal.

As of January 2026, ICE has signed more than 1,300 agreements with state and local law enforcement, deputizing them to make immigration arrests. The Administration has also restricted green cards, visas, and other means of obtaining pathways to citizenship. And the Department of Homeland Security is simultaneously pursuing a novel legal strategy of forcing asylum seekers to prove credible fear not just in their home countries but in multiple other countries that have signed agreements with the Trump Administration – or face deportation to one of those countries, such as Honduras or Uganda, even if the asylum seekers have never been there in their lives. (Just yesterday, a federal judge ruled the new policy is illegal; the Trump Administration is expected to appeal.) So, there may be a wave of thousands of asylum seekers subject to arrest and deportation in coming months, just as these new detention centers are slated to open.

Republican officials told us they were going to do this. Who can forget former acting ICE director Tom Lyons telling an audience last year that he aspired to a version of ICE that could more efficiently and systematically arrest and deport immigrants. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Lyons told a crowd. He said he wanted to see a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

The document unveiling the ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative reads like the fulfillment of that wish, described in Orwellian doublespeak. ICE says its new mega-prisons (“facilities”) will provide “a unified, scalable solution.” There couldn’t be a wider gap between the blend of government and corporate euphemism that describes how the new mega-prisons will be for “enhancing custody management and streamlining removal operations” to “help ICE effectuate mass deportations” and the horrifying details in reports that immigrants in ICE custody have been subject to physical and sexual abuse, food shortages, limited access to soap or functioning showers, proper beds, or necessary medication. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025.

Last Saturday, roughly 1,500 people showed up in the snow to protest ICE purchasing a local warehouse in Merrimack, New Hampshire, a town with roughly 30,000 residents. ICE was planning to spend $158 million turning the warehouse into a detention center that could hold 500 people. “Right now we’re trying to do anything we can to put sand in the gears to this actually going forward,” Merrimack resident Donna Larue told New Hampshire Public Radio. “This is an atrocity, and I think we’re just trying to find ways to go to the zoning board, go to the town council, and try to push back in any way we can.”

This Tuesday, New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte – a Republican who is so allied with the Trump Administration that ICE published its Detention Reengineering Initiative from the state’s website – announced that ICE would not be using the warehouse as a detention center after all. The protesters, who spanned the political spectrum, successfully put enough sand in the gears. People have been showing up across the country. In Texas, Michigan, New York, and other states, local residents have shown up at community meetings to oppose ICE imprisoning their immigrant neighbors in local warehouses. And ICE has abandoned its plans in several locations.

So, the Trump Administration’s plans for expanding ICE detention aren’t just chilling. They’re very unpopular. So, who do these plans benefit? As I’ve written about before, this all benefits Republican megadonors.